#EdTech Struggles - And Solutions!


If you know me well, and my wife will actually vouch for me on this, you know that I don't get mad very easily. In fact, Angela used to (jokingly) get mad at me because I would never get mad at her. Teaching for 5 years has helped develop this in me - if you get upset at every mishap or moment of rude, teenage behavior, you'll be mad your entire career. Some teachers seem like they are always mad.

I don't ever want that to become me. 

One of the reasons why some teachers stay away from technology in their classrooms is because of the incredible number of things that could go wrong! And it's a valid concern - on any given day, a laptop could break, a student could come in without their device charged, a web server could have crashed or any other number of things that you cannot control.

The other day I tried to have my class watch a live STEM in 30 webinar from the National Air and Space Museum.  The plan was relatively simple:
  • Connect to a live feed of the webinar during my 3rd hour class and record video using a screengrab. Simple enough. 
  • Quickly upload the video to YouTube before 4th, 5th and 7th hours so that each class could watch the video. 
  • Host a Today's Meet back-channel discussion. This kind of discussion allows students to have conversations while something else is going on. We all get bored during videos at times. A back-channel can help catch some of the kids who don't learn well visually and keep them engaged. 
First, the district filter blocked the streaming video site that the National Air and Space Museum was using. Easy enough - I just needed our wonderful tech wonder-woman, Colleen, to come down to my class and log in with her username and that would be overridden. What we didn't plan on was for my desktop to need about 8 minutes to log out of my user screen and log back into hers! We talked and neither of us know why it took that long, but it did. There goes the first 10 minutes of the live webinar.

Next, to solve the first issue I tried to connect to my mobile hotspot, which wouldn't have the school filter anyways. It would use some of my data, but it was only 30 minutes, so whatever! For the only time in my memory, my laptop would not connect to my hotspot! Now I'm feeling cursed.

We finally get logged in with Colleen's information so that she can bypass the filter. The webinar gets on the screen about 10 minutes in, so we still have about 20 minutes of live webinar and Today's Meet back-channel. This isn't perfect, but it's going and it's a learning experience. I have the screen recording and all appears on track for the rest of the day.

The webinar ends and I hit save.

I then see the most dreaded image at the top of the video recording software that one can see:


At this point, I'm ready to throw my desktop out the window, order some pizzas and call it a day! I'm done! I'm angry; I'm flustered; the kids are acting great, but I feel like they're all looking at me thinking what an idiot! 

One of the many skills teachers have to develop is a short memory. Third hour ended, I took the 5-minute passing period to take a lap around the hall and relax, 4th hour began and I had to make something up on the fly. 

I went to YouTube and searched for a WWI documentary on flying, which was the topic of the STEM in 30 webinar. I found one that was from a source that I had used before. My next class entered and I told them all about my terrible morning in what I can only describe as a 3-minute melodrama! 

This melodrama accomplished two important things. First, it calmed me down. I was making a joke of my morning, but I was also getting some real frustration off of my chest. I was yelling, but not at anyone. The yelling just made the kids laugh a little at me. Second, and probably more important in the long term, is I tried to make the whole thing a learning experience. Once I got the kids laughing a little bit about my follies, I got a bit more serious and talked about how my entire plan had crashed and burned. I talked about my thought process for figuring out what to do next. I compared it to their 20 Time Passion Projects and reminded them that some of them would have similar feelings at some point during their projects. 




And then I started the documentary and began the Today's Meet with them. Fourth hour went great. Fifth hour went great. Seventh hour went great. The students were engaged, some more in the documentary and some more in the Today's Meet, but they were engaged. You can scroll through the finished product below:


The lesson here is to keep calm, keep pushing and keep trying. You may not end up with the polished off, wonderful end result that you envisioned. You could end up with something even better.

Thanks for reading this blog! I hope you'll consider taking a moment to comment below and turn this into a conversation. Whether you are an educator or not, we have all had common experiences with education both good and bad. I want to hear what you think! 


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Social Media Lessons

First, a video.

The video is by a guy named Jack Vale. If you didn't watch it, essentially what he does is use a social media app to search for existing social media accounts in his vicinity. He pokes around and finds one that is not locked too tightly with security settings, and goes about finding this individual. He studies their profile enough to be able to kind of creep them out - things like telling them what they had for lunch, or where they work, or what kind of dog they have.

Nothing is really invasive, but it's also a well-intentioned guy trying to prove a point. Needless to say, not everyone online is as well-intentioned. As a teacher, this brings up a whole new realm for us to think about with our students. I am taking a course online called "Connected Educators" that is studying this topic right now. Whether you call it digital citizenship or something else, the idea is still the same - the world is becoming more connected and mistakes in one's youth are becoming more magnified.

This course has me thinking about my role in teaching students about digital citizenship. My thoughts center around a pretty singular thought:

Good digital citizenship alone will not get you a job, but bad digital citizenship alone may lose you a job.

My good friend Andy Hanch is also taking this class, and he talked about his own thinking with digital citizenship. One of the things that he said in his post this past week that struck me was the thought that teaching about this might not necessarily be our job, but that he has started too come around to the thought that it is ingrained in everything that we do online.

This mirrors pretty exactly my own journey of thought. I have to do more than except certain online behavior - I have to model and teach online behavior. 

Teaching with digital citizenship in mind is something that educators have to be ready to do. The future of our world is becoming more digital all the time. In my perfect school, we do not just teach content, but we teach how to be good people and good citizens. Nothing really changes, and yet EVERYTHING changes!

As if teaching wasn't hard enough already!

Thanks for reading this blog! I hope you'll consider taking a moment to comment below and turn this into a conversation. Whether you are an educator or not, we have all had common experiences with education both good and bad. I want to hear what you think! 


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My Little Bubble...

One of the things that surprised me most about teaching was the intense isolation that I felt my first year. If you don't put in the effort to leave your class and go see others, then you could easily go an entire day without talking to another adult. Now on any given day, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I found that my first year of teaching, when I was tired and stressed and sick of talking to and listening to students, more human interaction was the LAST thing that I wanted.

I began to retreat into my little bubble on a daily basis.

I would arrive through the side door closest to my room usually before most other teachers arrived. I would get to my room and work alone until kids showed up for the day. I was kind of a scrooge that first year, so none of the kids wanted to actually see me, so my class was empty except when I actually had a class.

I ate lunch alone.

I either worked, decompressed by reading ESPN, or took a cat-nap* during my plan period. The way the hall was configured, I really only interacted with one other teacher during passing periods.

*Yes, I did this. Not often - maybe 5 times during my first year teacher. Don't judge. It may happen again once our baby arrives in about 6 weeks! 

I was alone - emotionally and physically.

Today in my 5th year of teaching, while I value my own quiet time, I am rarely alone throughout the school day. Every day is an opportunity to find the next great idea, and often, that idea comes from someone right down the hallway, like my colleague and good friend, Steve Parker. 

As a teacher, connections are important. But too often when we in education talk about connections, we are only talking about student connections. The connections that we make with other teachers and administrators are just as important, though! This group, often called a PLN (Personal Learning Network), serves several key purposes for educators:
  • Brainstorm new ideas and projects. You'll learn to bounce your ideas off of others and also get inspiration for new ideas from talking to others and hearing their ideas.
  • Emotional support. Sometimes you are just having a bad day and need to vent for a second. If you have people to vent to, you can get it off of your chest and get back to being a great teacher.
  • Connected learning. How else could you grow as a teacher or administrator? That would be like a professional basketball player never watching game film.
  • TEAM. It's cliche, but Together Everyone Achieves More. It's true. By connecting to others, you'll learn more, you'll collaborate more, you'll become a more exciting teacher. It seems silly, but you'll start to want to come up with new, great ideas so that you can share them with your PLN. 
  • Connected educators share best-practices and learn quickly. Teaching is a trial and error kind of activity. Just like science, the moral trials and errors you have to learn from, the more quickly you'll learn. 
Becoming a connected educator extends into the online sphere. Whether that means that you are going to start writing your own blog to self-reflect or just lurk around Twitter, you now have the ability to connect to educators from around the world. Someone out there is doing something inspiring - you just have to be looking in the right places to find it.


You'll be amazed that before you know it, you'll be the one sharing something inspiring.  Rookie connected educators become veteran connected educators very quickly.

So here's my one suggestion that is easy and free and not Twitter - go visit other classrooms! Find other great teachers who are doing great things and go watch. Don't give warnings that you're coming - that makes it feel like something formal. Just grab your cup of coffee and go poke your head into 5 or 6 classrooms for a few minutes each.

Here's another hint: If the teacher you're visiting wants warning before you show up, then you're probably watching the wrong teacher. Every great teacher I've met is OK with people in their classroom any time of the day. Why is this? Because great teachers rarely waste time, even when they're doing something that to the outside observer seems pointless.

Go watch great teachers and learn from them!

Thanks for reading this blog! I hope you'll consider taking a moment to comment below and turn this into a conversation. Whether you are an educator or not, we have all had common experiences with education both good and bad. I want to hear what you think! 


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